


you drink light with your hands all winter

by Amiril



Series: Amiril Fic (Not Cover Art) [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel is the Empty, Dean Winchester is Death, M/M, No beta we go to Super Mega Turbo Hell like Castiel, Pining, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, Post-Season/Series 15, Sam Winchester is God, sort of child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27504790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/pseuds/Amiril
Summary: “I can’t keep doing this.” God says it like this as though it is is He, not Death, who is bound by the nature’s laws. He says it as though the world is not what He wants it to be.He says it as though He means it.“Please,” Death says. There’s a scythe heavy on his back, and a bundle of souls in the crook of his elbow. “Please, Sammy.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Amiril Fic (Not Cover Art) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/827448
Comments: 21
Kudos: 135





	you drink light with your hands all winter

**Author's Note:**

> I was making an [alignment chart](https://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/post/634453576657371136/i-havent-watched-spn-since-the-pulp-fiction) of potential endings and then I couldn't stop thinking about this so here we are I guess. All I know about the last three seasons is from tumblr and youtube clips. 
> 
> Title from [Introduction to Quantum Theory by Franny Choi](https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-franny-choi-the-adroit-journal)

“I can’t keep doing this.” God says it like this as though it is is He, not Death, who is bound by the nature’s laws. He says it as though the world is not what He wants it to be. 

He says it as though He means it.

“Please,” says Death. There is a scythe heavy on his back, and a bundle of souls in the crook of his elbow. “Please, Sammy.” He places the souls at God’s feat, watching the glow as they scatter into their own heavens.

God sighs, like He always does. “This is the last one.”

He said that last time, too.

And perhaps the time before that. Time hasn’t been something that mattered to either of them in quite a while. 

He cups His hands together, and His palms light up with an angel’s grace. A glowing ball that changes into a bright beam, and when God releases it, it opens a dozen eyes to the heavens.

“Hello, Sidriam,” says God.

Death looks at the ground. “Do you have to name them all?”

“Of course.” There is no judgement in His tone. “Lest you forget what you’re asking of me.”

“Where am I?” Sidriam asks. 

God reaches for him. “It doesn’t matter,” He says. “You are loved.”

A moment later, His blade is sticking out of one of Sidriam’s spinning rings, and Death gathers the baby angel up in his arms.

“Thank you.” It’s barely a whisper. 

“The _last time,_ Dean,” says God.

* * *

“Cas,” Dean calls. “Cas?”

“Right here.”

He isn’t really there, of course, but he can make himself into the Castiel shape. Same eyes, same coat, same tie, the only source of light in the nothingness.

Dean holds out Sidriam. “Brought you something.”

The Empty tilts his head a little, looking at the mind with only a moment of memory. “Dean,” he says. It sounds chiding. It sounds loving. “This is—”

“I know, man. I know.” He isn’t sure he knows anymore. “I just…” _I wanted to see you._ “I hate to think of you here all by yourself.”

The Empty strokes Sidriam’s rings, tucking him away to sleep next to Zaqiam and Orphaniam and Kushiam and Moriam. “I’m not by myself, really. I only wake up now when you come to visit.”

There are no chairs to sit in, and no beers to drink. Dean used to call up the facsimile of them. Used to pretend. He doesn’t know when he stopped. 

“You’re just sleeping and waiting for me?” he tries to make it sound like he’s joking. “That’s no way to live.”

Cas doesn’t have hands anymore, and Dean doesn’t really have a cheek, but Cas puts the approximation of one on the idea of the other. “We aren’t alive,” he says. “And even if we were… there are much worse ways to live.”

They don’t have bodies or lips or beating hearts but they can still press against each other. Still cling together as what they are: two concepts in the idea of Nothing.

* * *

After the End and In The Beginning, when Chuck was gone and Billie was gone and Cas was gone and the world was empty and quiet, Dean stood on the rocky shore of a beach.

He had been standing there for quite some time.

The water came in and the water went out, leaving a small grey fish floundering on the shore. Dean moved before he thought about why, before he thought about an angel who loved bees and cats and human beings.

He bent down to put it back into the water, but his hands passed through it. He still forgot, sometimes, that he could no longer control who lived and who died.

“Come on,” he said aloud. 

“It’s okay.” The water rose, just enough to sweep the stray creature back into the sea’s welcoming arms. Sam stood with His feet in the water, smiling. “I’ve got big plans for that fish.”

* * *

“Tell me about the humans,” the Empty says.

“They’ve discovered fire again.” Death has been collecting older and older people, lately. Hair going grey and skin going wrinkled and their souls carrying decades worth of stories. “Next thing you know, they’ll be starting wars and building cities. They grow up so fast.”

“Sam isn’t trying to stop them?”

He’d thought about it. _We could make the perfect world,_ He’d told Dean. _We know everything Chuck and—and Cas—did wrong, when it was their turn to be God._

 _We do,_ Dean had said.

Death pulls the Empty closer to him. “He learned by example.”

* * *

Death walks the path from Earth to Heaven, souls in his arms and by his side.

“It’s okay,” he tells the frightened ones. “You’re going to be happy.”

A red-haired woman smiles at him, and Death wonders why she seems so familiar.

Later, he whispers a sigil into a dream. 

* * *

“Do you remember how we met?” the Empty is touching Death in a way that gives the impressions of fingers running through hair, and Death wishes he never had to go anywhere else. 

“No.” He doesn’t think it would have been significant. Death is eternal. Just like the Empty. Just like God. They have always been how they are. “Do you?” 

“Of course,” the Empty says. “It has been much less time for me.” 

“Oh.” Death considers this. “Was it pleasant?”

“Not very.”

For some reason, this makes Death laugh. So little of his job is pleasant that the question had almost been a joke. He’s grown numb to the weeping and the crying. He’s grown numb to the relief, and the smiles at the gates of Heaven. He’s grown numb to the begging and the noises of Hell.

He has never grown numb to the Empty.

 _I love you,_ he thinks. He isn’t quite sure what it means anymore.

* * *

“Dean Winchester,” said Rowena, and Death frowned.

“What did you call me?”

 _“Death.”_ She sounded annoyed. “A statistically improbable number of my children have been dying lately. Humans are running about with sigils I don’t recall them having before.” 

Death shrugged, helping himself to a glass of wine. “They’re very creative.”

“Yes.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “Especially if a certain entity is encouraging them to kill demons so that he’ll have an excuse to visit his boyfriend.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” All humans bring lies to Death, and he thought he’d gotten very good at telling them. “Hey, have you seen that they’ve invented this thing called _television?”_

* * *

A woman stabs him with a toothed blade to save her daughter, and so Death dies like the Death before him and the Death before her: quickly, suddenly, and for someone else’s love. 

“Son of a _bitch,_ ” he says, in a language that hasn’t been spoken in millions of years. He lands in the Empty hard enough that his loses his non-existent breath. It’s not how it should have been done. He’s always brought both angels and demons here so gently, always handed them off to—

“Cas,” he says. “ _Cas?”_

“Death.” Cas is at his side, and his hands feel real. “Dean?”

“She killed me.” He’s been following in that family’s wake for a long time, scooping up the dead demons and angels they’d left behind. Owes them more than they’ll ever realize. “I didn’t think she’d have the guts.”

“That’s what you get for underestimating humans.” Cas helps pull Dean into a sitting position. “Did she really—are you—” his hands pause on Dean’s chest. There’s a hole in his shirt, and a hole in his skin, and there’s something that’s not quite grace and not quite blood and not quite sulfur oozing around it.

“I’m dead.” He laughs. Because it’s funny, isn’t it. “I think I’ve been dead before.”

“You have,” Cas says. His hands are still on Dean’s injuries, as though it’s possible for him to get even deader. “Do you remember?”

He isn’t sure. It’s as though there were pieces of himself here, left behind until he’d need them again. There’s a burning fire and the howl of hellhounds and cold lake water and Sam and God and Sam-God and Castiel and Castiel and Castiel.

“I don’t know.” But there are things he does know, things falling into place, and he thinks— again, again again, for the third time and the ten millionth time— _I love you,_ and now he remembers what it means. “Tell me?”

* * *

After the End and In The Beginning, God dies, as all gods do.

He wanders into the Empty, holding a book he hasn't finished yet and bearing scars left by the one who will take his place. His eyes are bright and he’s whistling a tune.

He stops three steps in, disgusted.

“Is that what you two have been up to for the last eon?” God asks. 

The Empty separates into two beings once more.

“No,” says one of them. “Sometimes we take turns sleeping. And sometimes Cas interrogates all the new arrivals about the state of the bees.” He hasn’t hugged God since they were flesh and blood, and it feels different and exactly the same as it always did. 

“Well,” says God, says Sam. “the bees are fine.”

“And the world?” asks Dean, asks the Righteous Man, asks Death, asks the Empty.

The world is a mess; that is its natural state. The world is perfect, and that is also its natural state. The world will continue with this new version of humanity, and it will continue with the one after that.

The world does not need a handful of people to save it.

The world cannot be saved. But that does not mean it will end.

Sam smiles. “Nothing for you to worry about.”


End file.
